The Eversons could well be Wellington’s hottest new ticket if their lyrical, satirical, and downright enjoyable E.P is anything to go by. It’s catchy, happy and witty, and most importantly cohesive. It feels like a band that have both a strong sense of their own musicality and a sense of what they want from and of their music. While occasionally the almost childlike starkness can feel like it’s just about to grate on you, it treads the line delicately, and there’s enough of a band having a good time in there to save it from itself. We caught up with Blair Everson and Tim Shann to find out how the record was made and what the future holds for the band.
Blair: We just used demos [as the EP]. We’d recorded them for the hell of it and then it was like ‘maybe this could be an EP’ and then Lil Chief came on board. Matt knew them through his old band, so yeah it all just happened accidently I suppose.
Tim: We just recorded it ourselves, I’ve got a studio up in the Hutt and we did it out there. Tracked it all separately, which was weird. It was real low key.
Blair: Tim and Mark went out and did the vocals, drums and bass one day, and then a couple of days later Chris and I went out and did the guitars. Then it was suddenly ‘oh we’ve done the whole thing!’
Tim: we never meant for anyone to hear it I suppose, we just wanted to record it, and then we thought, ‘Hey, we may as well just release this.’
Within the first 30 seconds of listening to the E.P. two things are obvious: the unusually funny narrative style of the lyrics and the obviousness of their being from New Zealand.
Tim: Whether or not Mark stumbled across that by accident I don’t know, but he’s going with it now definitely.
Blair: It’s very conscious. I remember lots of times Mark saying, ‘we have to sing in our NZ accents cause that’s all we’ve got.’ I think that it comes from rather than consciously making it sound like it’s from NZ, it’s consciously making it sound like it’s not anything else.
For a band that hasn’t quite been together a year the EP has a remarkably tight musicality. The songs complement each other and have a consistency. It’s a record that knows what it wants to be.
Blair: Yeah, it started out with Mark writing the songs to practice and us work shopping them a bit, and now he’s figured out the band vibe a bit more so he’s become a bit more self sufficient, so he will do an arrangement, record it all, send up the demo. It will probably be quite cheesy cause Mark’s quite a cheesy guy, and we’ll inject the band coolness. And Chris has started writing some songs. Chris is a really great songwriter, he’d been writing in a band called No Aloha, but he’s figured out the vibe of our band so we have just been working out songs of his recently too.
So what does the future hold for the Eversons?
Blair: We’ve got about 19 songs or something for an album, and we’ve got about 6 learnt so we’re just learning the rest of those. Then we’re going to record the album in December, release it early next year, then go on tour after that.
Tim: The plan is to do it totally live. We might have to do vocals later but definitely everything else live. But doing everything separately for this EP worked for us at the time.
Blair: The thing is, we can play well live together, and it’s a whole lot easier to play live if we can. I think the problem with lots of bands when recording and I mean, this is my general experience with recording with bands, is that you record in the studio, and there’s lots of fixing to do, and going back over certain parts. But the thing is, we’re all pretty competent musicians, we work pretty hard. So we could probably knock out a record pretty quick.
Tim: It just has a better vibe when you do it live, and maybe you have to be a geek to notice it but it just sounds better, and more like a band. And so that’s the way we want to do an album.
And now for the important stuff. If you could host a dinner party with one New Zealander, anyone alive and anyone deceased, who would you invite and what would you serve?
Blair: Alright. I think I might take all New Zealanders. Edmund Hillary will be my New Zealander, dead person… Peter Blake. My live person would be Sir Richard Hadlee. I would probably serve… a game meat… probably duck or something. We’d go out hunting first. I’ve got a moustache today so I think those three and I might be on the same level.
Tim: I’d go Dane Rumble, Stanley Kubrick and Scott Walker. I’d serve mild butter chicken. We’d all rip on Dane.
Barney Chunn
